Political Science

This course examines the evolution of the historiography of the Cold War, with its recent transformations, to then analyze the nature of today's international relations marked by the “return of competition between the super powers,” an expression created by the Pentagon in 2016. The Chinese and Russian analyses of the evolution of the world that we have long called "Post-Cold War" is also studied.

This course examines topical developments and highlights long-term trends in security choices of the former Soviet Union. Emphasis will be placed on the issues of great power rivalry, ethno-nationalism, and conflict management. The course will discuss security dilemmas at multiple levels, ranging from state policies to sub-state actors and transnational issues, but special attention will be given to regional security complexes involving Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

This course offers an exploration of the origins, functions, and effects of political institutions in historical perspective, paying particular attention to their dynamics (that is, how different institutions appeared and how they changed over time). The course utilizes critical reading and discussion of research papers that apply theoretical insights and empirical tools to engage in major debates about the nature and consequences of political institutions. The course integrates material from a variety of disciplines including political science, international relations, political philosophy, economics, and history. The course examines what types of political institutions form, why they form, what they do, and how they evolve. Students discuss a series of debates related to the rise and consolidation of states in historical perspective, and review current (and some classic) works on the subject. These debates include why nation-states came to dominate over other state forms (such as empires or city-states), which role elites played in state formation, in which ways the functions of the state began to take shape, or how state capacity was built and sustained in different places and times. 

This course returns to the formative texts of Michel Foucault on the topic of biopolitics, a concept that provides key insights into our contemporary political moment. It examines the major debates that have followed in political theory in the study of bio-power and biopolitics as terms integral to the fields of public health and virology (contagion, transmission, immunity, incubation, resilience, quarantine) now stand at the center of political discourse, framing conversations around policing, political economy, sovereignty, and democratic society. The course examines conceptual and historical questions of how life came to be understood as the object of government and how this has intensified the operations of power in the modern era. It also expands understanding of the concept by engaging with the array of topics in which biopolitics has made transformative interventions, from understanding the politics of DNA sequencing and stem cell research to analyzing the transformations of labor and global warfare. It considers how Foucault’s formulation has had wide-ranging effects on political theory, changing the way we understand the body, racism, colonialism, neoliberalism, war and violence, and the category of the human.

This multidisciplinary course considers equality, discrimination, affirmative action, and multiculturalism within the specific context of the U.S. experience. This experience is characterized by three structural features that Alexis de Tocqueville famously identified: the passion for equality, the salience of racial divisions, and the judicialization of politics. Elaborating upon those intuitions, the course relies extensively on history (that of ethno-racial and religious minorities since the early nineteenth century), law (through a thorough analysis of some of the key Supreme Court decisions in this area), political science (through the study of the emergence, development, and partial decline of race-conscious policies such as affirmative action and the redistricting designed to increase the number of Black and Hispanic elected representatives), and political philosophy (by discussing theories of social justice and equality, notably those of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Michael Walzer).